Streams

Has The West Forgotten About Nigeria's Missing Girls?

At least 91 people — boys, women, girls and even toddlers — are being held captive by the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram after weekend attacks on villages in Nigeria.

The new round of kidnappings comes just over two months after more than 200 school girls were taken captive in a mass abduction that sparked vocal outrage around the world. The hashtag #bringbackourgirls was tweeted millions of times, and even first lady Michelle Obama appeared in public holding a “bring back our girls” sign.

But that was then. Somehow, since the initial outrage, the signs and speeches and the small U.S. force that went into Nigeria to help find the girls, that sense of anger, have all but evaporated.

That sense of forgetting was articulated yesterday in a series of tweets by Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole, who wrote “… its emotional involvement having paid no dividends, the world had moved on, sorry, and the story, far from over, sad become invisible.”

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